A lot of the bulkheads have doublers where the stringers pass through to give you some more meat to screw into. So I cut out a bunch of circles with a 4″ hole saw and split them down the middle with the bandsaw. It’s been good way to use up the odd shaped offcuts. Then I epoxied them on with a single screw through where the notch gets cut out.

Cutting 70 some odd notches sounds tedious to do by hand and a good way for errors to creep in so I made a jig for a router. I first draw a line perpendicular to the lower strake right at the corner, then align my jig and mark out the notch. I score the line and jigsaw out the waste so there’s less to cut with the router and then clamp down the jig.

My little trim router does pretty well with a 1/4″ bit. When I first made the jig it cut a little deep so I glued a strip of paint stirrer along the fence and redid the notch.

Farther aft the plank angles are more extreme and the jig really sticks out a lot.

Lately I’ve been putting some of the bulkheads together. I’ve got numbers 1 and 3 just about done while I’m still working on number 8. I drew a centerline on a sheet of plywood and screwed the ribs to it so I could glue on a piece of hardwood. I’m happy to see that the gunnel ended up being less than 1/16″ off of where the plans say it should be. I also tried routing a groove in the access panel for a surgical tubing seal but my jig slipped and I wasn’t happy with how it turned out. So I filled it with thickened epoxy and I’ll try again after making a better jig.

This is the “complanionway” into the little cuddy cabin. The deck beam is laminated from four pieces of 3/8″ ply and I had about 1/2″ of springback after it was glued up and out of the jig. That’s a little more than I expected, so I’m thinking I’ll laminate on another strip and saw it to shape. The missing cleats on the starboard side of the bulkhead is where the off centerboard trunk will go and you can also see the self draining floor with what will become the end of the water ballast tank.